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An influential claim in the child language literature posits that children use structural cues in the input language to acquire verb meaning (Gleitman, 1990). One such cue is the of arguments co-occurring with the verb, which provides an indication as to the event type associated with the verb (Fisher, 1995). In some languages however (e.g. Hindi),...
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... study reveals that there is massive ambiguity in the input with respect to verb transitivity. Table 3 shows a fairly equal distribution of transitive verbs occurring in one argument and no argument contexts, with few (7%) transitive verbs occurring in a two-argument use. Even mediotransitive verbs, which have a relatively higher rate of realization of both arguments, occur in null or one-argument contexts 81.8% of the time. ...
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... Además, al organizarse en conjuntos cerrados, pueden ser identificadas más o menos rápidamente. Así, permiten identificar los esquemas de transitividad y sus significados asociados en lenguas con omisión frecuente de argumentos y orden de constituyentes flexible (Göksun et al., 2008;Narasimhan et al., 2005;Suzuki & Kobayashi, 2017). ...
... La morfología flexiva es adquirida más tempranamente que la derivativa (Derwing & Baker, 1986;Tyler & Nagy, 1989) debido, entre otras cosas, a su mayor productividad, regularidad y prominencia (al ubicarse próxima al comienzo y el final de la palabra; Peters, 1995). De esta manera, aunque los esquemas de transitividad de una lengua incluyan dispositivos morfológicos, el rol de estos dispositivos para el aprendizaje depende en gran medida de su disponibilidad y consistencia en el input infantil (Narasimhan et al., 2005;Rispoli, 1995). ...
... Además, al organizarse en conjuntos cerrados, pueden ser identificadas más o menos rápidamente. Así, permiten identificar los esquemas de transitividad y sus significados asociados en lenguas con omisión frecuente de argumentos y orden de constituyentes flexible (Göksun et al., 2008;Narasimhan et al., 2005;Suzuki & Kobayashi, 2017). ...
... La morfología flexiva es adquirida más tempranamente que la derivativa (Derwing & Baker, 1986;Tyler & Nagy, 1989) debido, entre otras cosas, a su mayor productividad, regularidad y prominencia (al ubicarse próxima al comienzo y el final de la palabra; Peters, 1995). De esta manera, aunque los esquemas de transitividad de una lengua incluyan dispositivos morfológicos, el rol de estos dispositivos para el aprendizaje depende en gran medida de su disponibilidad y consistencia en el input infantil (Narasimhan et al., 2005;Rispoli, 1995). ...
... Previous studies have sought to explore non-syntactic cues that may facilitate children's verb learning (Allen, 2000;Clancy et al., 2003;Göksun et al., 2008;Huang, 2012;Narasimhan et al., 2005). For instance, in the same study where the number of NPs was tested, Göksun et al. (2008) also examined the morphological cues and found a significant effect of accusative marking for acting out causal actions. ...
... For instance, in the same study where the number of NPs was tested, Göksun et al. (2008) also examined the morphological cues and found a significant effect of accusative marking for acting out causal actions. Also, Narasimhan et al. (2005) revealed that despite substantial argument ellipsis in Hindi CDS, 3-4 year-olds managed to produce error-free transitive constructions thanks to their exploitation of multiple cues such as context in discourse, verbal morphology and extra-linguistic cues. ...
... More specifically, both Göksun et al. (2008) and Ural et al. (2009) have found that while the number of NPs/nominals stayed as a significant factor (a weaker effect shown by Göksun et al., 2008, compared to English claimed by Naigles et al., 1993; a small, significant effect shown by Ural et al., 2009), morphological devices exhibited clear facilitation in verb learning. Secondly, as others have previously pointed out (Narasimhan et al., 2005;Huang, 2012), discourse and extra-linguistic cues might be relevant to the acquisition of lexical causative meaning as well. As introduced earlier, objects in retrieved in discourse or detected in the physical environment can remedy the missing essential units in the current linguistic expression. ...
Children use causative verbs in language to express causality. The learning of causatives relies on cues in children's interaction with caregivers. Argument structure has been widely posited as a facilitative cue for learning causatives. However, it may lack reliability due to ellipsis allowed in many languages, thus affecting children's acquisition of causatives. In this study, we investigate the role of object ellipsis in the learning of two prevalent types of causatives, namely lexical and morphological causatives. We take Turkish as a test case, which employs both types of causatives. The results show that the ellipsis in child-directed speech is pervasive in both causatives, with morphological causatives exhibiting a substantially lower proportion of ellipsis. However, by examining children's developmental trajectory, we show that lexical causatives develop with a pattern strikingly similar to the general development of verbs, whereas morphological causatives develop more slowly, despite less object ellipsis and explicit morphological marking. The findings suggest that argument structure may not play a major role in the learning of causatives. Our general conclusion is that children acquire causatives despite the challenge posed by pervasive ellipsis.
... 3 September 2020 | Volume 11 | Article 1935 a different gesture coding approach). This pattern reflects Givón's so-called principle of quantity (Givón, 1983), which predicts more marking material for less accessible information and less marking material for more accessible information (see also Ariel, 1988Ariel, , 1991Ariel, , 1996Prince, 1992;Gundel et al., 1993;Chafe, 1994;Arnold, 1998Arnold, , 2008Arnold, , 2010; and for child discourse, see e.g., Clancy, 1993;Hickmann and Hendriks, 1999;Allen and Schroder, 2003;Narasimhan et al., 2005;Serratrice, 2005;Allen, 2008). More importantly, the pattern is also at the heart of McNeill's theory of CD and gestures, which posits that the more a piece of information "pushes the communication forward" (Firbas, 1971, p. 136), the more likely it is that a gesture co-occurs with it. ...
The literature on bimodal discourse reference has shown that gestures are sensitive to referents’ information status in discourse. Gestures occur more often with new referents/first mentions than with given referents/subsequent mentions. However, because not all new entities at first mention occur with gestures, the current study examines whether gestures are sensitive to a difference in information status between brand-new and inferable entities and variation in nominal definiteness. Unexpectedly, the results show that gestures are more frequent with inferable referents (hearer new but discourse old) than with brand-new referents (hearer new and discourse new). The findings reveal new aspects of the relationship between gestures and speech in discourse, specifically suggesting a complementary (disambiguating) function for gestures in the context of first mentioned discourse entities. The results thus highlight the multi-functionality of gestures in relation to speech.
... Argument-dropping is pervasive in casual speech, including in speech to children. For example, in analyses of child-directed Japanese, more than 85% of transitive sentences were missing one or both arguments (Matsuo et al., 2012;Rispoli, 1989); similarly high rates of omission characterize child-directed speech in Korean, Hindi, and Mandarin (e.g., Clancy, 2009;Lee & Naigles, 2005;Narasimhan, Budwig, & Murty, 2005). ...
... But we also assume that learners face serious data sparseness problems in estimating the syntactic-semantic combinatorial behavior of each verb. For example, in languages with frequent argumentdropping, children might rarely or never get a chance to observe the true number of arguments typically assigned to relatively infrequent verbs (Bowerman & Brown, 2008;Narasimhan et al., 2005). This brings us to our second likely source of constraint. ...
... How arguments are realized in sentences depends on their place in a larger discourse. Noun-phrase arguments are pronominalized or omitted, not arbitrarily, but when their referents can be recovered from the situational or linguistic context (e.g., Allen, 2008;Clancy, 2003;Du Bois, 1987;Narasimhan et al., 2005;Prince, 1992). For example, arguments are more often omitted when their referents are given rather than new, or if they refer to entities that are present rather than absent. ...
Children use syntax to learn verbs, in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The structure‐mapping account proposes that syntactic bootstrapping begins with a universal bias to map each noun phrase in a sentence onto a participant role in a structured conceptual representation of an event. Equipped with this bias, children interpret the number of noun phrases accompanying a new verb as evidence about the semantic predicate–argument structure of the sentence, and therefore about the meaning of the verb. In this paper, we first review evidence for the structure–mapping account, and then discuss challenges to the account arising from the existence of languages that allow verbs' arguments to be omitted, such as Korean. These challenges prompt us to (a) refine our notion of the distributional learning mechanisms that create representations of sentence structure, and (b) propose that an expectation of discourse continuity allows children to gather linguistic evidence for each verb’s arguments across sentences in a coherent discourse. Taken together, the proposed learning mechanisms and biases sketch a route whereby simple aspects of sentence structure guide verb learning from the start of multi‐word sentence comprehension, and do so even if some of the new verb’s arguments are omitted due to discourse redundancy.
... Mak et al. 2006, Bresnan & Hay 2008, Branigan et al. 2008, Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky 2009). Animacy and closely related concepts have effects on language acquisition, and have been shown to provide a semantic cue for children to use as leverage into the syntactic system (Prat-Sala et al. 2000, Clancy 2003, Narasimhan et al. 2005, Bittner 2006, Buckle et al. 2017). Very young infants demonstrate sensitivity to properties relevant to animacy, such as the presence of eyes and self-propelled motion (Rakison & Poulin-Dubois 2001), yet the distinction between animate and inanimate entities is claimed to undergo refinement and reorganisation over the course of cognitive development, e.g. in the scope and specificity of the animacy distinction and in the understanding of causality (Opfer & Gelman 2011). ...
Most, if not all, languages exhibit “animacy effects”: grammatical structures interact with the relative animacy of noun referents, as represented on various versions of animacy scales, with human discourse participants at one end and inanimate objects at the other. Cross-linguistic evidence attests to a range of linguistic phenomena conditioned by animacy, with complex effects requiring (a) subtler distinctions than a binary contrast [± animate] and (b) more sophisticated analyses than mapping higher animacy to higher grammatical role.
This paper introduces the Special Issue, “Effects of Animacy in Grammar and Cognition”, in which the linguistic interest in grammatical effects of animacy is aligned with broader questions concerning animacy in cognition, including the origins of animacy in language, the biases underlying how we attend to animacy distinctions and how animacy affects discourse. Recent work in cognitive science and adjacent fields has contributed to the understanding of the role of animacy across linguistic domains. Yet, despite the consensus that sensitivity to animacy is a property central to human cognition, there is no agreement on how to incorporate animacy within linguistic theories. This SI focusses on the cognitive construal of animacy, aiming to extend our understanding of its role in grammar(s) and theory.
... Hindi is a highly inflected language with flexible word order and high argument ellipsis. Hindi also presents an important contrast to English because in Hindi, many individual verbs are overtly marked as being causative (transitive) and inchoative (intransitive) (Budwig et al., 2006;Narasimhan, Budwig, & Murty, 2005). For example, an English-acquiring child has to learn the verb roll which can then be used in the same form in the intransitive ("The ball rolled") and the transitive ("The boy rolled the ball"). ...
One of the wonders of human development is children’s symbolic capacity to generate language that goes beyond the input received. The present study examines this developmental process with special focus on language typological factors. More specifically, it examines 2-and 3-year-old Albanian-speaking children’s ability to acquire transitive and intransitive constructions in an experimental context. Thirty 2- and 3-year old Albanian-speaking children divided into two age cohorts were trained and then tested using an elicited production task based on the novel verb paradigm. Findings reveal that Albanian-speaking children are precocious in their productivity with transitive and intransitive verb constructions. In contrast to much prior research on English-speaking children, results revealed that most Albanian-speaking children were able to productively use familiar and novel verbs in both transitive and intransitive constructions, regardless of age and whether they heard the novel verbs modeled in verb constructions tested. It is argued that languages with explicit markings for agent- patient relations facilitate an earlier onset of productivity than word-order languages like English. Additionally, results suggest that children’s capacity to diversely use familiar verbs affects the developmental process of acquiring new verbs including those used in novel verb experiments. Discussion focuses on the importance of using naturalistic experimental designs to construct a more comprehensive view of the process by which children acquire verb constructions and also considers the implications of the cross-linguistic findings for developmental theories of language acquisition.
DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2017.v6n1p87
... Previous research on the development of case systems has predominantly focused on the first language acquisition of a variety of languages, including not only German (see, e.g., Clahsen, Eisenbeiß, & Vainikka, 1994;Eisenbeiß, Bartke, & Clahsen, 2005;Schmitz, 2006), Turkish (see, e.g., Aksu-Koç & Slobin, 1985;Ketrez & Aksu-Koç, 2009), Russian (see, e.g. Slobin, 1966;Babyonyshev, 1993;Gagarina & Voeĭkova, 2009), and Japanese (see, e.g., Lakshmanan & Ozeki, 1996) but also Basque and Hindi, which are most relevant to this chapter because they are languages with ergative features (see, e.g., Narasimhan, 2005;Narasimhan, Budwig, & Murty, 2005;Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Kumar Choudhary, Witzlack-Makarevich, & Bickel, 2008;Austin, 2012;Ezeizabarrena, 2012). In contrast to the high number of L1 studies, the L2 acquisition of case systems is strikingly underrepresented in the research literature; in particular, this phenomenon holds true for L2 Hindi, given that to the best of our knowledge, no study has been published that focuses exclusively on the development of case in L2 Hindi. ...
... In addition to the Montrul et al. study, there are several published accounts of child language acquisition of Hindi and other languages with ergative constructions. For instance, in this context, Narasimhan et al. (2005) and Narasimhan (2005) examined the acquisition of Hindi; Ochs (1982Ochs ( , 1986) examined the acquisition of Samoan; Schieffelin (1981Schieffelin ( , 1985 examined the acquisition of Kaluli; and Ezeizabarrena and Larrañaga (1996), Larrañaga (2000Larrañaga ( , 2001, Ezeizabarrena (2012) and Austin (2012) examined the acquisition of Basque. In addition, a collection of studies on the acquisition of ergativity in a variety of languages has recently been published by Bavin and Stoll (2014). ...
... However, she did not find any cases of overgeneralisation in her data, and the children appeared to be aware that the ergative marking should be restricted to transitive, perfective constructions. Narasimhan et al. (2005) replicated the earlier Narasimhan (2005) study and confirmed a lack of the overgeneralisation of the ergative case in the speech of young children. ...
... One of the strongest discourse-relevant influences on children's referential choice is the accessibility of referents in the interaction (Allen, 2000;Clancy, 1993Clancy, , 1997Huang, 2011;Hughes & Allen, 2013;Narasimhan et al., 2005;Serratrice, 2005). Like adults, children must choose a referential form that takes into account how active the referent is in the mental representation of the interlocutor, and thus how easy it is for the interlocutor to access it. ...
... Similarly, children hearing a high information form tend to interpret the corresponding referent as new or less available in the discourse, while children hearing a low information form tend to interpret the corresponding referent as easily accessible and already familiar. Further, accessible referents appear predominantly as subjects of transitive verbs, while inaccessible referents appear predominantly as objects, in a pattern known as Preferred Argument Structure (Allen & Schröder, 2003;Clancy, 2003;Du Bois, 1987;Huang, 2012a;Narasimhan et al., 2005). ...
... One of the strongest discourse-relevant influences on children's referential choice is the accessibility of referents in the interaction (Allen, 2000;Clancy, 1993Clancy, , 1997Huang, 2011;Hughes & Allen, 2013;Narasimhan, Budwig, & Murty, 2005;Serratrice, 2005). Like adults, children must choose a referential form that takes into account how active the referent is in the mental representation of the interlocutor, and thus how easy it is for the interlocutor to access it. ...
... Similarly, children hearing a high information form tend to interpret the corresponding referent as new or less available in the discourse, while children hearing a low information form tend to interpret the corresponding referent as easily accessible and already familiar. Further, accessible referents appear predominantly as subjects of transitive verbs, while inaccessible referents appear predominantly as objects, in a pattern known as Preferred Argument Structure (Allen & Schröder, 2003;Clancy, 2003;Du Bois, 1987;Huang, 2012a;Narasimhan et al., 2005). ...
